Narrowing in from the broader context of the north Atlantic, through northern Europe, to Britain, northeast Scotland, and finally the fishing village of Gamrie, this anthropology of Protestantism examines millennialist faith and economic crisis. Through his ethnographic study of the fishermen and their religious beliefs, Webster speaks to larger debates about religious radicalism, materiality, economy, language, and the symbolic. These debates (occurring within the ostensibly secular context of contemporary Scotland) also call into question assumptions about the decline of religion in modern industrial societies. By chronicling how these individuals experience life as "enchanted," this book explores the global processes of religious conversion, economic crisis, and political struggle.

This guide serves as a valuable introduction to the documentary heritage and tradition of the third largest group of protestants in the southern United States. A companion to Harold Prince's A Presbyterian Bibliography (1983), it locates and describes the unpublished papers of PCUS ministers. It also documents the larger southern tradition by including selected materials from the antebellum period and from other Presbyterian denominations. The result is a listing of resources for the study of the PCUS as well as southern Presbyterianism. It aims to promote and encourage research in Presbyterian history; to make files, diaries, sermons, minutes, letters more intelligible; and finally, to emphasize the continuing relevance of these materials in contemporary church life. Robert Benedetto's forty-eight-page introduction includes a survey of nine subject areas: theology, education, church and society, international missions, national missions, women, racial ethnic ministries, ecumenical relations, and worship and music. Each area highlights major research and provides a concise orientation to the life and mission of the denomination. Each survey is followed by a brief listing of manuscript materials. The Guide itself includes manuscript collections from the Department of History (Montreat) and other repositories. This thorough volume concludes with a bibliography of PCUS reference works and a complete name and subject index.

In The Reformation of Feeling, Susan Karant-Nunn looks beyond and beneath the formal doctrinal and moral demands of the Reformation in Germany to examine the emotional tenor of the programs that the emerging creeds-revised Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism/Reformed theology-developed for their members. As revealed by the surviving sermons from this period, preaching clergy of each faith both explicitly and implicitly provided their listeners with distinct models of a mood to be cultivated. To encourage their parishioners to make an emotional investment in their faith, all three drew upon rhetorical elements that were already present in late medieval Catholicism and elevated them into confessional touchstones.
Looking at archival materials containing direct references to feeling, Karant-Nunn focuses on treatments of death and sermons on the Passion. She amplifies these sources with considerations of the decorative, liturgical, musical, and disciplinary changes that ecclesiastical leaders introduced during the period from the late fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. Within individual sermons, Karant-Nunn also examines topical elements-including Jews at the crucifixion, the Virgin Mary's voluminous weeping below the Cross, and struggles against competing denominations-that were intended to arouse particular kinds of sentiment. Finally, she discusses surviving testimony from the laity in order to assess at least some Christians' reception of these lessons on proper devotional feeling.
This book is exceptional in its presentation of a cultural rather than theological or behavioral study of the broader movement to remake Christianity. As Karant-Nunn conclusively demonstrates, in the eyes of the Reformation's formative personalities strict adherence to doctrine and upright demeanor did not constitute an adequate piety. The truly devout had to engage their hearts in their faith.

Specialist historians have long known the usefulness of this 1869 book, now more easily available for anyone interested in the history of London, its buildings, and its religious and social world, in an enhanced edition. William Beck was a Quaker architect, and Frederick Ball grew up in the rambling old Devonshire House building, centre of British Quakerism at the time. Their survey of London Quaker history was part of a mid-19th century awakening of Friends to the significance of their own past. This facsimile reprint contains a new introduction, by Simon Dixon PhD, author of the thesis "Quaker Communities in London 1667-c1714," and Quaker writer and editor Peter Daniels. Where possible, illustrations have been inserted of the buildings described in the book, and there is a comprehensive new index.

Although this work takes proper notice of its origins in John Wesley's 18th-century movement in England, it assumes that in America the people called Methodists developed in distinctive fashion. The volume examines this American version, its organization, leadership, and form of training and incorporating new members. The authors treat Methodism as defined by conferences bound together by a commitment to episcopal leadership and animated by various forms of lay piety. Offering a fresh perspective based on sound, modern scholarship, this study will be of interest to scholars, students, and anyone interested in church history. American Methodists early organized into conferences that defined Methodist space and time and served as the locus of power. At the same time, they created a strong episcopal form of church government, subject to the body of preachers in conference, but free to lead and direct the organization as a whole. This mission was clear, well understood, and suited to the ethos of a growing America--"to spread scriptural holiness in the land and to create a desire to flee from the wrath to come." By the middle of the 19th century, Methodists in America had grown from an insignificant sect to America's largest Protestant group. Essential to that growth were structures and processes of lay involvement, particularly class meetings and Sunday schools.

The first of three theological volumes, this volume is devoted tofour of John Wesley's foundational treatises on soteriology. These treatises include, first, Wesley s extract from the Homilies of the Church of England, which he published to convince his fellow Anglican clergy that the evangelical emphasis on believers experiencing a conscious assurance of God s pardoning love was consistent with this standard of Anglican doctrine. Next comes Wesley s extract of Richard Baxter s Aphorisms of Justification, aimed more at those who shared his evangelical emphasis, invoking this honored moderate Puritan to challenge antinomian conceptions of the doctrine of justification by faith. This is followed by Wesley s abridgement of the Shorter Catechism issued by the Westminster Assembly in his Christian Library, where he affirms broad areas of agreement with this standard of Reformed doctrine while quietly removing items with which he disagreed. The fourth item is Wesley s extended response to the Dissenter John Taylor on the doctrine of original sin, which highlights differences within the broad Arminian camp, with Wesley resisting a drift toward naively optimistic views of human nature that he discerned in Taylor. "

This book reveals the huge sales and propagandist potential of Anglican parish magazines, while demonstrating the Anglican Church's misunderstanding of the real issues at its heart, and its collective collapse of confidence as it contemplated social change.

Despite being widely recognized as John Wesley's key moment of Christian conversion, Aldersgate has continued to mystify regarding its exact meaning and significance to Wesley personally. This book brings clarity to the impact this event had on Wesley over the course of his lifetime by closely examining all of Wesley's writings pertaining to Aldersgate and framing them within the wider context of contemporary conversion narratives. The central aim of this study is to establish Wesley's interpretation of his Aldersgate experience as it developed from its initial impressions on the night of 24 May 1738 to its mature articulation in the 1770s. By paying close attention to the language of his diaries, letters, journals, sermons, tracts and other writings, fresh insights into Wesley's own perspective are revealed. When these insights are brought into wider context of other conversion narratives in the Christian milieu in which Wesley worked and wrote, this book demonstrates that this single event contributed in significant ways to the ethos of the Methodist movement, and many other denominations, even up to the present day. This is a unique study of the conversion of one of history's most influential Christian figures, and the impact that such narratives still have on us today. As such, it will be of great use to scholars of Methodism, theology, religious history and religious studies more generally.

N. T. Wright's Jesus and the Victory of God is widely heralded as one of the most significant and brilliantly argued works in the current "third quest" of the historical Jesus. In this second volume of his multivolume investigation entitled Christian Origins and the Question of God, Wright uncovers a Jesus that most historians and believers have never met. Rooted and engaged in the soil of Israel's history, its first-century plight and its prophetic hope, Wright's portrait of Jesus has set new terms of discourse and debate. Through Wright's lens, familiar sayings and actions of Jesus have fresh meaning. But in the midst of all that is new, Wright also offers a profile of Jesus that bears striking lines of continuity with the Jesus of Christian belief and worship. This resemblance has captured the attention of confessing Christian biblical scholars and theologians. Wright's work thus far is of such consequence that it seemed timely and strategic to publish a scholarly engagement with his reconstruction of the historical Jesus. Like all works in progress, Wright's proposal is still under construction. But its cornerstone has been laid, the foundation has been formed, the pillars and walls are going up, and even if we cannot yet see how the ceiling, roof and parapets will look, there is quite enough to engage the minds of colleagues, critics and other curious onlookers. For the purposes of this book (and in keeping with IVP's own evangelical identity), editor Carey Newman invited scholars who are committed to Christian belief as it has been classically defined to engage Wright's Jesus and the Victory of God. Newman sets the stage with an introduction, and Craig Blomberg offers a critical and appreciative overview of Jesus and the Victory of God. Various facets of Wright's proposal are then investigated by contributors: Paul Eddy on Jesus as prophet, Messiah and embodiment of Yahweh Klyne Snodgrass on the parables Craig Evans on Israel under continuing exile Darrell Bock on the trial and death of Jesus Dale Allison on apocalyptic language Richard Hays on ethics Alister McGrath on the implications for evangelical theology Stephen Evans on methodological naturalism in historical biblical scholarship Luke Timothy Johnson on Wright's historiography To these essayists Wright extends his "grateful dialogue." He gives this spirited and illuminating reply to his interlocuters: "The high compliment of having a whole book devoted to the discussion of one's work is finely balanced by the probing, intelligent questions and by the occasional thud of a blunt instrument on the back of one's head. . . . Only once did I look up my lawyer's telephone number." After Wright takes his turn, his good friend and frequent partner in debate Marcus Borg offers his "appreciative disagreement." Newman then concludes the dialogue with his own reflections on moving from Wright's reconstruction of the historical Jesus to the church's Christ. A book assessing a scholar's work is usually an end-of-career event. But in this case interested readers can look forward with eager anticipation to Wright's next volume in Christian Origins and the Question of God--this one on the resurrection of Jesus.

This book analyzes two large surveys of clergy and lay people in the Church of England taken in 2001 and 2013. The period between the two surveys was one of turbulence and change, and the surveys offer a unique insight into how such change affected grassroots opinion on topics such as marriage, women's ordination, sexual orientation, and the leadership of the Church. Andrew Village analyzes each topic to show how opinion varied by sex, age, education, location, ordination, and church tradition. Shifts that occurred in the period between the two surveys are then examined, and the results paint a detailed picture of how beliefs and attitudes vary across the Church and have evolved over time. This work uncovers some unforeseen but important trends that will shape the trajectory of the Church in the years ahead.

In recent years, millions of people have joined churches such as the Seventh-day Adventist which prosper enormously in different parts of the world. The Road to Clarity is one of the first ethnographic in-depth studies of this phenomenon. It is a vivid account based on almost two years of participation in ordinary church members' daily religious and non-religious lives. The book offers a fascinating inquiry into the nature of long-term commitment to Adventism among rural people in Madagascar. Eva Keller argues that the key attraction of the church lies in the excitement of study, argument, and intellectual exploration. This is a novel approach which challenges utilitarian and cultural particularist explanations of the success of this kind of Christianity.

Traditionally Protestant theology, between Luther's early reforming career and the dawn of the Enlightenment, has been seen in terms of decline and fall into the wastelands of rationalism and scholastic speculation. Editors Trueman and Clark challenge this perception in this transatlantic collection of eighteen essays covering: Luther and Calvin; Early Reformed Orthodoxy; the British Connection; From High Orthodoxy to Enlightenment; and the Rise of Lutheran Orthodoxy.